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Craig Silverman, a journalist and cofounder of Indicator, a site that investigates deception on digital platforms, said that reporting on the context and true scope of the protests would have a hard time competing with the visceral images broadcast into Americans’ homes.

“I just have a hard time believing something could be a rivalry when there’s no stakes,” he said.

“What we seem to have a hard time doing is differentiating where our internally mastered knowledge stops and where the knowledge we can just look up but feels a lot like our knowledge begins,” Fisher said.

“I have a hard time making short docs,” jokes Gibney, whose 2023 MGM+ documentary “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” stretched 3½ hours.

“I think a lot of people have a hard time believing that the frivolous, ‘whatever’ content they're watching is potentially affecting their fundamental beliefs about American politics.”